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Figure 1. Distribution of the Blue Jay.

Blue Jay, TN, 7 January.

Perhaps one of the most recognizable birds in North America, the Blue Jay is a familiar bird of the East and North. Ages and sexes are similar after the juvenile plumage is mostly replaced during the first fall, and only in-hand examination can reveal specific age classes. The following is a link to this photographer's website: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rockytopk9/.

No doubt the Blue Jay was one of the first North American birds to become well known to Europeans. In the sixteenth century, John White made a watercolor illustration of this bird (
Feduccia, A. (1989). Birds of colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Found.
Feduccia 1989), and Linnaeus (
Linnaeus, C. (1758a). Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis. 10th ed. Vol. 1. Holmiae: Tom. I. Laurentii Salvii.
Linnaeus 1758a) used the text and illustration of the “Blew Jay” (see
Feduccia, A. (1989). Birds of colonial Williamsburg. Williamsburg, VA: The Colonial Williamsburg Found.
Feduccia 1989) by Catesby (
Catesby, M. (1731). The natural history of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. Vol. 1. London: Mark Catesby.
Catesby 1731) when he wrote what became the official description of the species. Behavior was ably if colorfully described by Alexander Wilson (
Wilson, A. and C. L. Bonaparte. (1831). American ornithology; or, the natural history of the birds of the United States. Philadelphia, PA: Porter and Coates.
Wilson and Bonaparte 1831: 134): the Blue Jay “is distinguished as a kind of beau among feathered tenants of our woods, by the brilliancy of his dress; and like most other coxcombs, makes himself still more conspicuous by his loquacity, and the oddness of his tones and gestures.”

Much of the information in this account comes from unpublished theses and dissertations and from Woolfenden and Travin's own work with Blue Jays in s.-central Florida and Smith's work in northwestern Arkansas. For more than a decade Woolfenden and Tarvin studied Blue Jays at Archbold Biological Station. They used baited traps to capture, band, and census the jays, but established no ad libitum feeding stations. Local jays, known by their color bands, only infrequently were attracted to their stations from distances greater than 1 km, and they detected no evidence of migration. They were thus able to observe many individual jays during all months of the year in areas in which nearly every individual was marked.

From the sketchy accounts in the published literature, numerous unpublished theses, and observations at Archbold, Woolfenden and Travin postulated several aspects of the social system of the Blue Jay. The main elements include the following: (1) the basic social unit is a monogamous pair, which remains in the same limited area throughout the year; (2) pairs do not defend territories in any classical sense, but defend the nest site from individuals that come too close; (3) they do not breed cooperatively, but conduct group social displays and mob predators and intruders, perhaps as members of a loosely organized neighborhood flock.